"The Trader Who Donates Half his Pay"

My parents forwarded me Nick Kristof's NY Times column from yesterday, "The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay." I think it's worth a read.

Reading it pulled me out of this very unique Patagonian world I'm living in for five days - intense geography, rural schools, wool prices, grass regeneration, sheep - and took me back to the decision-making that got me here in the first place. 

A year ago, I was working an interesting job in New York that paid well but had me looking at a screen most of the time. It wasn't arbitrage or trading, but it had me using numbers and making money for big companies. My rationale for taking the job had been some combination of "learn practical, business skills here you can use later to make government or NGOs or whatnot more efficient" and "make money here and save it to give away, also later." I can still see the value in both of these ideas, and I don't fault anyone who takes a job for those reasons. For me, that was not the right job. I missed interacting with people other than at lunch time. So I made moves to become a teacher, and in the meantime I am enjoying a stint as a freelance reporter.

Reading about Matt Wage (also, nice last name), I questioned my decision-making. Maybe I had just been selfish, wanting to do a job that made me happy. At the least, his idea - making such intense calculations as to the effectiveness of your job in improving the world - is interesting.

And I applaud him. I don't think giving away half your salary is easy when you start working in a world made out of money. I think what Wage does is extremely relevant for my peers who enjoy their jobs in finance or consulting. Even if they didn't start their career with the objective of giving away most of their salary, they could take a page out of his book.

I recognize Wage from college - or I think I do, and I'm going to make a lot of assumptions. He's a good person who's hard-wired to enjoy close analysis, philosophic or financial. He'd be that brilliant guy in my philosophy section who made one amazing comment each class and who did all of the reading and stayed after to talk with the TA because he was able to focus in one one line from Singer and keep that focus even when it was 5 pm and everyone else was going to hear Sonia Sotomayor give a master's tea, or play soccer on Cross Campus. He'd definitely be a nice guy. (I can also imagine that, like most people would be, he is a little relieved that his moral calculus took him to an arbitrage job in Hong Kong rather than to a refugee camp in Syria).

But extending the "effective altruism" argument too far ignores a few things, which Kristof points out. First:

 "There is more to life than self-mortification, and obsessive cost-benefit calculus, it seems to me, subtracts from the zest of life."

As an extension of this, Matt Wage's calculus works for him - but we also need people who are going to run the NGOs that do the best work he donates to; who are going to write the articles that show us how bad the malaria crisis is in developing countries; who are going to teach kids in struggling schools across the U.S.

When you have the privilege of an education like Wage's - like I do, and like many of you reading this, I assume - you also have the privilege of making choices. This means that you can pick where you think you can do the most good AND be your best self. I know that I would not be happy in Wage's job, even if I were giving away half of my pre-tax income. I would feel that some essential part of me was lying fallow (and I'd be sleep-deprived and mean). And so I think I'd be missing out on some of the good I can do in the world.

I worry that a story like Wage's will be yet another selling point for the finance and consulting companies that take a disproportionate number of "elite" graduates each year. To people who are still in college, I say: if you know you love teaching, or writing, or tracking endangered birds, or titrating cells to find a cure for cancer, I believe there is unquantifiable benefit to the world in you doing what you love. 

I write all of this pretty sure, especially after the past two months, that business is an essential tool for fixing most things going wrong in the world. Money makes things happen, as Kristof's piece lays out. And I think I'm heading in the direction of business, of some sort, as a career. I just want to intertwine the ultimate impact I make with the way I live. 

I'd love to hear what people think about this, in comments or by email or whatnot. This is an interesting, deeper-dive into the question, from 2013 in the Washington Post.

Maps

Geography is tangible here. When Ricardo picked me up on Thursday and drove me the 200 kilometers from Rio Gallegos to his family’s sheep ranch, Monte Dinero, he interrupted our conversation to narrate our coordinates. Now we’re going west, towards the border with Chile; now we’re going south; and now east, tracking the border again, which cuts across this land like a crack in a piece of terracotta. 

Understanding your cardinal position in the world must be important when you are reaching the extremes of a continent, or a planet. You feel a curve in the earth when you look at a map and see that here, we are at Mile 0 of Ruta 40, the road that runs all the way up Argentina’s long spine. We are at the end of continental America. (Ushuaia, the main city of Argentine Tierra del Fuego, the island that sits right below us, ups the ante: it’s “the end of the world”). These superlatives can be used to sell things. Monte Dinero plays its touristic cards well by calling its tea house “Al Fin y al Cabo” - “In the End,” a nice word play that also refers to the Cabo, the point that juts out into the Straits of Magellan. Ricardo and his wife Marcela have tried for years to start a public school on the ranch and finally succeeded this year, an election year, because regional politicians saw the benefit in funding “The Southernmost school in Argentina.”

Here more than anywhere I’ve been, I want to see where I am on a map. The land itself orients you but it’s almost like you need to remind yourself that the extremity is real. Yes, here I am, a dot on the edge. [Humans have impacted this area a lot more than this wild feeling would give away, but that’s another topic].

We drove far out into the ranch today to look for the dogs who guard Monte’s sheep. They are Maremma sheep dogs; maybe it was just our relative proximity to Antarctica, but seen through binoculars from the truck they looked like polar bears. They’re ferocious with most creatures other than the sheep they’re born with and the humans who train them. Ricardo, Joel, Jeremy and I stayed in the truck while Marcela said hello to them. When she had had her time, we turned the truck around and started the drive back to the house. We had to stop for a moment. Marcela went silent and the boys looked up from their cellphone video game because at the end of the sea of grass was the Atlantic Ocean bright blue and holding down the horizon. 

Fluff Post

Things I Should Have Packed:

1. A Charles Schwab debit card, which miraculously does not slap you with double fees when you withdraw money from foreign ATMs.

2. Duct tape, because flip-flops break and your budget is limited and you would rather spend money on wine than on new flip-flops. 

3. Emergen-C.

4. Ear plugs and one of those geeky sleep masks, for 5 am airplane rides where the lights stay on and the breakfast cart rattles up the aisle right after take-off to tempt you out of much-needed slumber with the smell of croissants.

5. Simple stationery to leave thank-you notes along the trail of incredible generosity. 

On Sidewalks and Walls, at Least 13 of Them

Gracias, che, Wallace Stevens (13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)

1.

I went for a walk this evening when I was sleepy. I wanted the reality of my feet on pavement and tangible proof that this is a melancholy city like everyone says.

I walked past parents waiting to pick up their kids at school. I walked through a 6-block area of clothing outlets. I sat at a cafe and bought a coffee. On my way home, it was dusk, and through an open window I heard four friends cooking dinner in their first floor apartment.

2.

On a wall near this apartment, in simple black lines, five mothers of disappeared children hold a car over their heads. The iron goods store is missing a letter on its sign. Plmberia. Light shines through. A window’s open playing the radio, tango. 

3.

There are 500,000 registered dogs in this city. Some starving artists and/or talented dog whisperers walk 20 dogs at a time for extra money. That’s 20 dogs walking on a sidewalk at once, and one person who is probably not paying attention to the pooper scooping laws. Just saying. 

4.

That was the prettiest one we’ve seen yet today, the construction worker said, when the girl with the long ponytail was just a step past him. Te cojo todo, said the old man, when the girl in the short uniform skirt of the middle school walked by. Ay mamiii, the dude on motorcycle whistled, then slurped. And so 89% of women in Buenos Aires say they often change the route they take to get to work, or school. 

5.

I crossed the street to buy a lighter. A man walked home singing a song I didn’t know, skipping the sidewalks altogether.

6.

You can take a graffiti tour of Buenos Aires, I’m told. For $25 USD, you can tour four neighborhoods by foot and by van, learning about how the urban art scene was born in the fire of the military dictatorship. 

7.

The poor man’s graffiti tour: count how many times you see a wall scrawled with nunca mas, nunca mas. Never again, never again. 

8.

I was going to say these sidewalks are shadowy, but that implies they’re creepy. Around here, the shadows cradle the night. In the shadow of a fig leaf, you can see it’s green, growing, covering the sidewalk with photosynthesized light. 

9.

What are Buenos Aires sidewalks like in the morning? Does Buenos Aires have a morning? The night ends at 5 a.m., and you sleep until noon. Do you dream of sidewalks? 

10.

There’s a sidewalk, he told me, his voice slow and deliberate, savoring each word. It’s in Abasto, where he lives, a neighborhood that's still a neighborhood. In the day, old men with big bellies sit on benches and yell. Che, che, tomamos unos matés?  He puffs out his belly in imitation and turns his voice to an aged squawk. You guys, wanna drink some maté!? Then his voice sinks deep again and he smiles at me. I love that sidewalk. 

11.

Look down, cause you’ll trip if you don’t. Hexagonal tiles ripple in mounds over tree roots. Look down. Someone pulled the Tetris blocks off the screen and made them a sidewalk. Look down. Across the street from where the murals are brightest, most beautiful, the ground opens up into dust and an open manhole. 

12.

Look up. There’s crumbled sidewalk dust and an open manhole and a manhole construction crew, but across the street a mural covers a white house with bright green leaves and technicolor flowers.

13.

I tried to get that mural on my camera. It was washed out. I tried to get two houses on my camera. They were washed out, nowhere near pink and orange, nowhere near the warmth of the light that hit them. 

I’m not sure you can photograph any of these walls. You can only see them walking slowly, moving past them, letting them go. 

From the Archives

I bet there is a Borges quote or a Carlos Gardel tango line about how Buenos Aires is a city of nostalgia.

This piece has nothing to do with Buenos Aires, but my posting it here is an act of nostalgia. Right now, my working definition of nostalgia is "the feeling you get after you read 45 short pieces you wrote in your senior spring of college."

I just went through all the prompts from Daily Themes, a writing class I took two years ago, in order to find a few to play with here. Of course, this led me to what I wrote in response to them. 

***

8. Tuesday at the Lodges

 “Harry and Elenita got a new puppy,” she had said a few months ago. “Cache-cache. It means hide-and-seek in French, you know. The most delicious dog!”

At dinner at the Lodges Cache-cache sat under the white-clothed table and there were buttery baked tomatoes on our plates and the rain dripped under eave lights on the slate outside and Uncle Harry spoke in time with wine about Japanese art and the art of being a good doctor and over dessert they laughed about Nonna’s sweet tooth and the way she would regally demand to check her email on vacation and the rain kept dripping under eave lights on the slate outside the most horrendous weather and so and so and Cache-Cache under the table eating crumbs and so wine lights drip would, Laura would, remember? transform from a missing presence to a person who has died some time ago, now.